Even when success came to him as a painter, he had to struggle to make things work on his terms, rather than be dictated to by others. This went for his private life as much as for his art, and for a while there in the '50s, the two got awkwardly scrambled.

In 1944, the painter Paul Cadmus started coming to Marsh's art classes in New York. Cadmus's influence on Tooker as a painter was crucial. Not only did Tooker follow him by using tempera in a more tightly controlled manner (Marsh's style was looser), he gained the confidence to use the medium to address contemporary social themes.

He also became Cadmus's lover. The problem was that, as Tooker puts it now, "Paul was still ((the painter)) Jared French's lover." Not only that, but French was married.

''I had to defer to the Frenches," Tooker explains, with a strange combination of ruefulness and detached amusement. "I eventually told Paul I wanted to find someone to commit to me. When I met William, I told Paul, and he understood."

Through Cadmus, Tooker met writers, poets, artists and critics, including E.M. Forster, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, George Platt Lynes, and Lincoln Kirstein, the dance critic and cultural impresario who became Tooker's most important champion.

Kirstein was responsible for having him included in the MoMA show, "Fourteen Americans" (his inclusion was so last-minute, he says, "that I didn't make it into the show's catalog"). But again, Tooker had to battle to be his own man.

Kirstein, who was Cadmus's brother-in-law, "sort of took over," he explains. "He was the one ((at a later date)) who coined the term 'magic realism.' I wasn't so keen on the label. I had a show coming up, and he was to write the catalog. I rebelled. I got another person to do it. I didn't want him to put his seal on things. He sort of felt that he owned that kind of painting."

Although he didn't convert to Catholicism until 1976, three years after Christopher's death, Tooker claimed in 1989 that "religion was always implicit in my work."

His father was a devout Episcopalian, his mother "almost an agnostic" with a Cuban Catholic background. As a young man, he was sensitive to intolerance, and admired the writings of Dorothy Day in the Catholic Worker. Writing in the show's catalog, Robert Cozzolino, the curator of modern art at the Pennsylvania Academy, noted that Day drew attention to issues of injustice and bigotry that the mainstream press preferred to ignore and "grounded her moral stance in spirituality."

Just as, in Catholicism, images are expected to inspire the viewer to spiritual action, Tooker hoped from very early on that his visual parables - he called them "protest paintings" - would have a moral effect.

Some of these paintings, such as "Supper" (1963), which shows a black man blessing a loaf of bread in a scene recalling the biblical theme of the "Supper at Emmaus," were influenced by his experience with Christopher, who was actively engaged in the civil rights movement.

Today, when asked why he stopped painting them, he says, "I just felt they'd run their course. I didn't have anything more to say." Asked whether they had the kind of effect he desired, he laughs: "I don't know that they had any effect at all!"

Gradually Tooker's themes became less explicitly social and more frankly spiritual. His light, in paintings like "Woman with Oranges" (1977), and "Embrace of Peace II" (1988), came to be suffused with warm oranges and yellows that seem not just to reflect light but to generate it from within.

Certainly, there is something anachronistic about Tooker's work. There always was. To be painting in egg tempera in the painstaking manner of Piero della Francesca just as Pollock was treating the canvas as a physical arena for self-expression akin to a dance stage seems almost willfully contrarian. But figurative artists like Tooker and abstract painters like Pollock may not have been as diametrically opposed in the postwar years as they appear to us now.

Cozzolino, talking by phone from Philadelphia, believes "the idea that they were in different camps and philosophically unbridgeable is in many ways just a product of the critics - and especially Clement Greenberg," the influential champion of American abstract painting.